Carmen Atkinson

Auditory Processing Deficits in Children with Reading and Language Impairments: Can They (and Should They) Be Treated?.

Sixty-five children with specific reading disability (SRD), 25 children with specific language impairment (SLI), and 37 age-matched controls were tested for their frequency discrimination, rapid auditory processing, vowel discrimination, and consonant-vowel discrimination. Subgroups of children with SRD or SLI produced abnormal frequency discrimination (42%), rapid auditory processing (12%), vowel discrimination (23%), or consonant-vowel discrimination (18%) thresholds for their age. Twenty-eight of these children trained on a programme that targeted their specific auditory processing deficit for 6 weeks. Twenty-five of these 28 trainees produced normal thresholds for their targeted processing skill after training. These gains were not explained by gains in auditory attention, in the ability to do psychophysical tasks in general, or by test-retest effects. The 25 successful trainees also produced significantly higher scores on spoken language and spelling tests after training. However, an untrained control group showed test-retest effects on the same tests. These results suggest that auditory processing deficits can be treated successfully in children with SRD and SLI but that this does not help them acquire new reading, spelling, or spoken language skills.

Anxiety and the neural processing of threat in faces.

This study examined the relationship between social anxiety and the neural processing of threat in faces. Twenty-one adults with different levels of society anxiety were tested for their event-related potential responses to unattended threatening and nonthreatening faces, presented upright and upside-down, at three points in time: 160–210 ms (vertex positive potential), 300–350 ms (N3) and 440–500 ms (P3). Social anxiety was significantly correlated with the size of P3 to upright angry faces but not happy faces. This supports the theory that anxiety diverts attention towards goal-irrelevant threat cues, and suggests that this threat-related shift in attention starts to affect the processing of faces at 440–500 ms.

Switching associations between facial identity and emotional expression: A behavioural and ERP study

The aim of this study was to determine if, and when, the neural processes involved in switching associations formed with angry and happy faces start to diverge. We measured event-related potentials (ERPs) and behavioural responses while participants performed a reversal learning task with angry and happy faces. In the task, participants were simultaneously presented with two neutral faces and learned to associate one of the faces with an emotional expression (either angry or happy), which was displayed by the face when correctly selected. After three to seven trials, the face that had consistently been displaying an emotional expression when selected would instead remain neutral, signalling the participant to switch their response and select the other face on the subsequent trial. The neural processes involved in switching associations formed with angry and happy faces diverged 375 ms after stimulus onset. Specifically, P3a amplitude was reduced and P3b latency was delayed when participants were cued to switch associations formed with angry expressions compared to happy expressions. This difference was also evident in later behavioural responses, which showed that it was more difficult to switch associations made with angry expressions than happy expressions. These findings may reflect an adaptive mechanism that facilitates the maintenance of our memory of threatening individuals by associating them with their potential threat.

Can Training Normalize Atypical Passive Auditory ERPs in Children with SRD or SLI

This study tested if training can normalize atypical passive auditory event-related potentials in the N1-P2 time window in children with specific reading disability (SRD) or specific language impairment (SLI). Children with SRD or SLI and untrained controls were tested for their behavioral responses and N1-P2 windows to tones, backward-masked tones, vowels, and consonant-vowels. Children with SRD or SLI with poor behavioral responses to one of these sounds trained to discriminate that sound for 30 minutes a day, 4 days a week, for 6 weeks. Post-training measures revealed that training normalized atypical behavioral responses but not atypical N1-P2 windows.